PARTISAN REVIEW
107
A soft knock on the door broke
his
reveries. Rollie huniedly
tied the envelope, replaced it in the carton and pushed it back into the
closet.
He opened the door and ushered in
his
conferee, Sherry,
a
twenty-one-year-old divorcee majoring in Civilization at night. Her
fim paper on love among the Medici had shown astonishing insight,
written
in
a
kind of serene prose, disengaged, without nervous tics
and cute defenses of the average paper. She said she wouldn't dream
of writing a paper without first freeing herself, and Mr. Mergenthaler
could free himself too. She would help him
if
he was interested.
"I brought the stuff," she said, as she took Marvena's seat.
Rollie liked to work
his
way into a subject. Her abruptness
disturbed
him.
"What stuff?"
"I told you
I
would turn you on."
"I have a class in an hour."
"We can share a joint. You'll teach up a storm." She reached
into her bag and took out a cigarette, loosely wrapped, with the
paper twisted at one end.
"Doesn't it make you kind of free, sexually, that is?" Rollie
asked, looking at the cigarette.
"You know it," she said. She took out a pack of matches and
started to strike one.
"Wait a minute," Rollie said. "I want to
talk
about
this
a little
more. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel. Do you get high, like
with
liquor? Is there a big release?"
Sherry leaned back in her chair and sighed. "Larry, my
ex–
husband, he asked me the same thing. What does it feel like? Will
I get hooked?
He
was afraid he would lose his substitute teacher's
license."
"Malraux had an opium smoker in
his
book,
Man's Fate.
He
tries
to
show a spiritual nirvana, a lucid self-awareness as a result
of the drug. I was wondering whether marijuana might not combine
spirit and sense in a meaningful way, so that the essential I-Thouness
could
be
achieved. You know, a short cut from the meditative
pro–
cedure recommended by ecclesiasts."
Sherry looked at him for a moment and lit the cigarette. "Here,
you have got to take in air, a lot, as you puff. There's a lot of
1-
Thouness in every puff. There is probably even some you-meness too."
